"For this life only..."

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are all people most to be pitied.” I Corinthians 15:19

As I have written this BLOG over the past months, I have struggled to come to terms with the loss of the presence of God. I have also struggled to come to terms with the finality of the end of human life and what I now see as a hopeless fantasy for an eternal and better life in some other existence after our deaths here.

I have explored again the "arguments for God" in the philosophy of religion and have tried to see if we might take religious God language and “interpret” it in some other, non-theistic way to make it more palatable. I am now reading John Shelby Spong’s most recent book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. While I greatly admire his courage to speak out against the failed paradigm of literalist, fantastical Christianity, I cannot say that I share his “inexpressable-in-language” belief in the reality of God (even a nontheistic God) and the resurrection of Jesus. Clearly, he makes an “argument” about the resurrection as “experience” and finds fault not so much with the experience itself as with the way that it was later concretized in writing and doctrine. For me, however, this "possibility," while intelectually interesting perhaps, does not captivate. What “experience” can I point to that suggests transcendence or a reality beyond that which is visible to the eyes and palpable to the senses? I wish that I were as optimistic as he seems to be that we can make a revised Christianity “work." I will reserve judgment until I have finished the book of course, but any “optimistic” way seems to me to be too much like the wishful thinking that gave birth to theism in the first place. I just cannot, no matter how hard I chew the term, find much meaning in the definition of God as the “ground of being” or “being itself.” I know what "beings" are, but what is “being itself?” We can all dream up paradoxes, but that does not endow them with some sort of numinous or supernatural existence.

I wonder, when I read the line above from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church if there might be some “solace” in a religion that is “for this life only.” Perhaps the answer to the existential dilemma is to admit that, tragically, it has no answer. We are, each of us, on a walk from birth to death, and the entirety of all that we know/do/are will have to be bracketed by these events. It is not, then, just faith in Jesus or any single pursuit, but everything that is “for this life only.” We are, perhaps, “most to be pitied," if we understand and admit this finitude. No window dressing. No caveats or maybes or sighs about the numinous or some other vague conception of eternity/transcendence. Just the simple reality and admission that it is all “for this life only.”

What might it mean, then, to live in full knowledge and acceptance of that fact that all is “for this life only," to really believe that each and every living creature, known and unknown to us also lives “for this life only?” First and emotionally for me, there is a sort of quiet despair and sense of ultimate hopelessness in this acknowledgement. A sense of doom and tragedy clearly seems to pervade how I feel when I look at myself and the world from this point of view. I feel somehow, as well, as if I should speak and move quietly and softly, rather like the visitors at a funeral. Laughing and joking and, indeed, any strong emotions seem rather out of place. It is an occasion for downcast eyes and knowing “shakes of the head” and those soft shoulder pats that we give one another in sympathy and grief.

If there is, perhaps, some “ethic” in this sort of realization, it might be that we do what we can to retard decline/decay and the end of “this life only” for ourselves and for others. We also should do what we can to reduce, if possible, the suffering of others as well as ourselves and try to “do as little harm as possible.” Entropy must, of course, increase, but there is no need for us to encourage it. We may still be seen to be the “most pitiable” but that may be the best that we can do.... “for this life only.”

Jeffrey Shy
Mesa, Arizona
"for this life" at least